Hogwarts Legacy and the Extended Transphobic Cinematic Universe

The only real Hogwarts Legacy is one of eliminationism and hate.

by Evan Urquhart

Joanne Kathleen Rowling is known for two things: Extreme, unrelenting transphobia and the creation of Harry Potter and his larger fantasy world. A video game that takes place in that world, Hogwarts Legacy, comes out this week. Due to Rowling’s decision to make anti-trans political activism central to her public persona, it’s impossible to talk about a game set within her creation without bringing her ugly, exterminationist politics to the fore. This is why many trans people called for a boycott of the game.
Now the first reviews for Hogwarts Legacy are coming out, and the positivity of those reviews combined with the robust pre-order numbers make it clear, already, that this will be a blockbuster game. And, the game itself does not seem to include transphobic content. It’s been known for a while that the character customization options in Hogwarts Legacy would allow for a range of gender expressions. In one of the first news items post-embargo, it also turns out that there’s also a trans character, Sirona Ryan, the proprietress of a pub called The Three Broomsticks, included in the game.

Hogwarts Legacy is therefore in a unique place, culturally speaking. At one and the same time the game includes trans people in a positive way, and bolsters both the reputation and the bank account of a woman who may have done more to propagate transphobic lies and eliminationist rhetoric more than any other single person has.

Rowling’s fame and money have given her huge cultural influence. The controversial nature of the the stance she’s taken in opposing trans people’s humanity and dignity has only increased that influence, as every tiny detail of her feud with the trans community is meticulously covered in the press. Because of the power she holds to dictate the terms of the conversation about trans people, no single video game, however inclusive, could ever outweigh the harm she’s done, and will inevitably continue to do. The PR team for Hogwarts Legacy may succeed in muddying the issue enough so that Rowling’s toxicity won’t hurt sales, but they can’t remove or even mitigate the harm she’s done, or prevent the harm she will continue to do. To the contrary, by bringing positive attention to the Harry Potter universe the game can’t help but bolster Rowling’s fame and reputation, increase the coverage of her transphobia, and legitimize her as a political actor whose aim is the dehumanization of trans people and the removal of trans voices from public life.

Rowling herself often insists she is not anti-trans, in much the same way Donald Trump has said he is “the least racist person.” So it behooves us to take a look back at exactly what she’s done and said to cement this opinion of her as committedly, implacably transphobic and even eliminationist in the minds of trans people and their allies.

Before 2020, Rowling was already widely rumored to hold anti-trans views. The whispers began over some of the accounts she followed on social media, who were very strident about their anti-trans views. In 2018 the rumors became public when she liked a tweet from an anti-trans account. The specific tweet wasn’t a joke, or anything mild or easy to misinterpret. It concerned the poster’s opposition to trans women being included in lists of women candidates for the Labor Party and referred to trans women as “men in dresses” and their supporters as “brocialist.” Rowling’s like (which her publicist brushed off as a “middle-aged moment”), was supportive of two things: Denying trans women the ability to be recognized as women and using derisive and dehumanizing language as part of that effort to exclude them. In 2019, Rowling also tweeted her support for Maya Forstater, a woman who lost her job after making dehumanizing, offensive statements about trans people at work. But it wasn’t until June of 2020 that she more openly elucidated her views.

The first toe in the water was a tweet where Rowling made it clear that she opposed trans men being included in discussions about menstruation, insisting in a joking fashion that there was a word for “people who menstruate” and that word was woman, and only women. A few days afterwards, Rowling followed up with a 3500+ word essay on the reasons for her opposition to transgender rights, removing all doubts about the authors’ political opposition to transgender rights, and in particular her opposition to the acceptance or recognition of trans men as men.

The extremism of Rowling’s 2020 essay has sometimes been underplayed, in part due to the widespread erasure of transgender men, which has resulted in a lack of mainstream understanding of how transphobic rhetoric specifically targets them. Rowling spends almost a third of her essay on trans men, but she never uses the phrase “trans men” directly, or engages with the idea that trans men might have the right, or the ability, to speak for themselves. Rowling instead speaks of the need to protect women and girls from being allowed to believe that they are trans. 

Rowling’s essay devotes more space to this negation of trans men than any other single topic, but that doesn’t mean they were her only target. The essay also adds fuel to the panic over trans women (a panic which regularly results in violence against them), by implying that cis women can’t be safe in women’s spaces where trans women are allowed. Rowling keeps her insinuations far more vague than her detailed frontal attack on trans men, but the import is very clear: She is suggesting that one of the most marginalized and vulnerable groups of people in the world, trans women, are really a dangerous threat.

Ever since then, Rowling has made demonizing trans people and opposing trans rights central to her politics. Some of her behavior has been petty, as when she blocked Stephen King and deleted a tweet praising him after he wrote that trans women are women. Other behavior has been much more, as when Rowling publicly lied about the impact of a Scottish law to reduce the bureaucracy involved in obtaining a gender recognition certificate, falsely claiming that it would harm women in prisons and domestic violence shelters. In fact a gender recognition certificate has literally no impact on either.

Even Rowling’s charitable activities of late seem to have been motivated solely by her obsessive hatred of trans people.

Against all this, a bit part for a trans character in Hogwarts Legacy, some character customization options, or the inclusion of they/them pronouns is a negligible entry on the other side of the ledger. These minor tweaks to a game set in Rowling’s world provide a fig leaf, allowing people who have economically invested in the game to distance themselves from the creator of the world. The inevitable effect, apart from helping those people protect their investment, will be to add to the confusion over whether Rowling has ever done anything that bad. But Rowling’s actions are, in fact, that bad, as I hope we have shown. She is a world famous multi-millionaire who has made demonizing trans people the focus of her public statements and political activism for years. The only real Hogwarts Legacy is one of eliminationism and hate.